文档介绍：外文翻译
原文:
Does Public Ownership of Equity Improve Earnings Quality?
I. INTRODUCTION
The quality of accounting information is influenced by an array of factors, most of which stem from the demand for such information for use in contractual arrangements and from the incentives and opportunities of management to manage the reported numbers. Both the demand for quality accounting information for contractual purposes and management incentives to adjust the reported earnings are likely to be influenced by whether the equity of pany is privately held or publicly traded. In this study, we examine the differential earnings quality of private equity and public equity firms in order to shed light on how public ownership of equity affects the quality of firms’ earnings. Because earnings ‘‘quality’’ has multiple dimensions, in our tests we examine a number of attributes that have been associated by previous research with the notion of earnings quality.
The influence that public or private ownership has on the quality of accounting numbers has been examined in limited contexts by past studies. Beatty et al. (2002), Burgstahler et al. (2006), and Penno and Simon (1986) focus on the difference between public and private firms with respect to one dimension of earnings quality—the extent to which earnings are managed. The association between ownership type and another earnings attribute, conservatism, is examined by Ball and Shivakumar (2005). Because financial data of privately owned firms is generally unavailable, these studies are restricted to regulated industries such as banking and insurance for which financial reports of both public and panies are filed with industry regulators (., Beatty et al. 2002) or to countries such as the . in which accounting information is available for panies because they must publicly file financial statements (., Ball and Shivakumar 2005).
The results of these studies on the differential earnings quality of public versus panies are